The Bookworm Beat 6/11/16 — the “everything is interesting” edition and open thread

The establishment is very afraid of Donald Trump. Thomas Lifson is correct that it is outrageous for U.S. “Intelligence” officials to try to sabotage Trump’s campaign by saying they’re afraid to give him intelligence briefings. This would be despicable under any circumstances, but it’s especially grotesque considering that the only reason Hillary is not rotting in prison for treasonous high crimes and misdemeanors is because the President is protecting her (probably because she knows his secrets, just as he knows hers).

What’s really disgraceful about this already disgraceful spectacle is that these establishment types seem to have forgiven Hillary the whole Benghazi debacle, from the mismanagement before; to the vanishing act during, which almost certainly cost four lives; to the cover-up after. Others have not forgotten:

Ann Coulter takes on those accusing Trump of racism. Ann is in fine, sarcastic fettle as she flushes out the cowards (on the Right) and race hustlers (on the Left) who are attacking Trump:

Curiel has distributed scholarships to illegal aliens. [Bookworm here: Which ought to get him impeached.] He belongs to an organization that sends lawyers to the border to ensure thatno illegal aliens’ “human rights” are violated. The name of the organization? The San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association — “La Raza” meaning THE RACE.

Let’s pause to imagine the nomination hearings for a white male who belonged to any organization for white people — much less one with the words “THE RACE” in its title.

The media were going to call Trump a racist whatever he did, and his attack on a Hispanic judge is way better than when they said it was racist for Republicans to talk about Obama’s golfing.

Has anyone ever complained about the ethnicity of white judges or white juries? I’ve done some research and it turns out … THAT’S ALL WE’VE HEARD FOR THE PAST 40 YEARS.

Even Hispanics seem disturbed by the radicals in their midst, as demonstrated by the surprisingly high support Trump has among Hispanic voters.

Democrats turning U.S. into a banana republic. Juan Hernandez is one totally cool dude. Why do I say that? Read his Washington Post opinion piece about the broken nose he got when he attended the Donald Trump rally in San Jose — the one that was attacked by Judge Curiel’s friends in La Raza. Read it all the way to the end. And then you’ll agree with me that Juan Hernandez is one cool dude.

Naughty Iran. Is anyone surprised that Iran is still the world’s terrorism leader? I’m only surprised that, flush with US cash, Iran hasn’t upped its terrorism game even more. But don’t worry — our national security apparatus is protecting us. Oh, wait! No, it’s not. In Obama’s seven-plus years, our national security apparatus has been neutered when it comes to the threat from radical Islam.

Pet peeve time about word choice. My mother spent more than three and a half years in a Japanese concentration camp. This was not a sinecure. Even in the women’s camps, prisoners were tortured, starved, and left vulnerable to the worst tropical diseases — and they were the lucky ones.

Overall, it’s reasonable to believe that the Japanese murdered more than 5 million civilians, often with the utmost brutality. Yet my mother, and other similarly situated civilians, never talked about “surviving a Japanese concentration camp.” They talked about “being interned in a Japanese concentration camp.” One “survived” the war. One “survived” the Holocaust. One “survived” Auschwitz. But a European or American civilian, especially a woman, in a Japanese camp in Malaya or Indonesia or the Philippines “was interned.”

Meanwhile, back in America, Roosevelt’s Democrat government interned Americans of Japanese descent. It was a panicked move, deprived the Japanese of their civil rights, their liberty, and their property, and is a stain on the Democrats’ conscience. But although interned, the Japanese were not starved, they were not tortured, they were not left to die from terrible diseases. I’m not excusing what happened to them, but let’s be honest: It was no Bataan Death March, and it was no Auschwitz, and it wasn’t even the civilians interned across the Malayan peninsula. It was just Democrats acting badly….

So you can appreciate how irritated I was when some research I was doing led me to the web page for Macalester College’s “Multicultural Life” center. When I clicked on “about,” I learned this:

The Lealtad-Suzuki Center is named after Catharine Deaver Lealtad (’15), the first African American graduate of Macalester College and a talented doctor; and Esther Torii Suzuki (’46), a survivor of the Japanese internment camps during WWII and a six-year member of the Macalester College Alumni Board. Located on the first floor of Kagin Commons, the Lealtad-Suzuki Center is a part of the Department of Multicultural Life.

I’m sure Ms. Suzuki is a lovely lady and, as I said, what America did to Japanese Americans was a constitutional violation (although Michelle Malkin has argued that it was not an unreasonable security step to take at the time). But it was not a death camp! She was interned during the war, she did not “survive internment.” Yes, this is a picky and picayune point, but it still bugs me.

Antisemitism is on the rise. David P. Goldman penned a devastating article about the way in which antisemitism is not only on the rise, it’s becoming “respectable”:

On most university campuses the majority of young brainwash victims take it for granted that Israeli nastiness is the source of the endemic Jew-hatred in the Muslim world. That mindset prevails from Berkeley to the Vatican Secretariat. A billion and half people cry from the bottom of their hearts: For us to live, they must die, or at least be driven from their homeland. The wretchedness and despair of this great mass of humanity, a tiny fraction of which has turned up on Europe’s doorstep, is too great to ignore. Surely the Jews must in some way be responsible. It is enough to turn some liberal Jews into functional anti-Semites.

Thankfully, except for the dark, nasty fringes where it’s always lived, antisemitism does not yet seem to have infected American conservatives. That’s why I suspect that Erin Schrode, 25, a hard, hard-Left Jewish woman who’s running for the House of Representatives, is being assaulted by members of her own party, who are sending her this kind of message: “Everyone knows it’s TIME for America’s first evil retarded teen cunt Congress kike!” “Fire up the oven!” “All would laugh with glee as they gang raped her and then bashed her bagel eating brains in.” I hope she loses big time, but I hope she loses because of her appalling Leftist politics (she makes the Progressive Huffman look moderate), and not because the Democrat base is indeed ready to “Fire up the oven.”

Who is the Republican Party? I was speaking last night with a Republican friend, and we both agreed that there has been a profound shift in the Republican Party. In the old days, Republicans were upper class and upper-middle class educated Americans. Democrats were working and lower-middle-class Americans, often without college degrees. Now, though, the very rich and the very poor belong to the Democrat party. There are many middle-class conservatives, but they’re college-educated conservatives, which means that they share the same values and reflexes as their Democrat cousins.

The new core — the base, if you will — of the Republican party is working and lower-middle-class Americans who are, on average, very well-informed, but that’s because they’re autodidacts, not college graduates. They’re for Trump, and their better-educated cousins are horrified. Ace says, rightly I think, that the horrified ones are marginalizing themselves. And I say that the effort to draft Scott Walker at the convention is a mistake.

The Obama administration continues to shred the Constitution. Megan McArdle is no wild-eyed conservative (unlike me). That means that when she says that it’s wrong for the administration to have improperly paid health insurance subsidies and that the House should definitely have standing to sue (if not the House, who?), people should sit up and pay attention.

But as Kevin Williamson notes at length, with this administration, we effectively have the sick cousin of that old expression “no harm, no foul.” In Obama-land, it’s massive harm (lying, cheating, obfuscating, etc.) and never any fouls, as no one is fired, imprisoned, or even reprimanded.

What happens when Muslim refugees take over your child’s school. “Children who are beaten, kicked, choked and suffer other degrading treatment – It has now become everyday life at the Central School in Kristianstad [Sweden]. The school has received a large number of new students from the recent asylum chaos, and has two preparatory classes for newly arrived immigrants.”

The decline and fall of Target. I have a confession to make: I was in the San Rafael Target the other day. One of the kids needed something and, short of driving 40 miles to the nearest Wal-Mart, the Target store was the only place I could get it. I have to say, though, that it was a kind of gratifying trip because, on a Thursday afternoon, the place was a ghost town. Lest I let my prejudices interfere with my perception, I said to my child (who has no idea about the Target toilet kerfuffle), “Did it seem kind of empty to you?” The answer: “Yeah, that was totally weird. It was like a ghost town.”

It’s a shame, really, because I always liked shopping at Target. But the CEO’s hard-Left arrogance is getting the marketplace slapdown it deserves.